Continuing
from Part 1, here’s the rest of the schweet schtuff I got my hands on at Bandai
Namco:

Project CARS

PC, Xbox One, PS4 - November 2014

Wii U - 2015

The best way of summarising the crowd-funded Project
CARS is that it is to racing games what Dark
Souls is to fantasy games.

No
perceivable story – not that it needs one – but whoa-on-a-stick is there a ton of customisation, tracks, cars,
difficulty settings, AI settings and weather presets. You could probably drive
a go-kart around Bathurst’s Mt Panorama on high difficulty against overly-aggressive AI competitors, with
realistic tyre-ruining sand and an encroaching rainstorm, given the amount of
flexibility there is in the gameplay setup.

Actually,
that’s exactly what we did do. Mt Panorama. In go-karts. With rain coming.

While I can
definitely recommend Project CARS for
driving enthusiasts, particularly those who were unimpressed by recent Forza and Gran Turismo offerings, the one big thing screaming at me is that
it’s very much a game for hardcore drivers. Granted, you can scale back the
difficulty to human levels and still get a lot of fun from it, but I gather
those with the most to gain are the ones content to while away time getting
their presets just right for the
ultimate driving experience. The controls are also not suited to drivers like
me who just wanna firewall the gas pedal without crashing into every barrier
the track offers (though that is still very entertaining).

I personally
suck at driving games that don’t involve missiles or mushroom speed boosts, but
I still greatly enjoyed Project CARS.
The fact that a crowd-funded game produced work of this calibre is also a very
good reason to support crowd-funding, if you didn’t have one already.

Also,
go-karts. On Mt Panorama. With rain
coming.

Natural Doctrine

PS3, PS4 - September 2014

Of all the
schweet stuff Bandai Namco showed me, the most disappointing for me was Natural Doctrine. It’s like mashing up
early days Final FantasyTactics with latter-day XCOM, but without the ease of control in
the latter and about twice as much repetitive (and slightly grating) dialogue.

I confess
I’m not entirely flush on the story Doctrine
offers, though given the amount of character chatter in-between missions I am
certain there is one, but it’s got something to do with mercenaries protecting
some blonde lady who’s apparently important and is testing them for something.
Also she carries a blunderbuss. As attempts at stories go it’s a start, I
guess.

Gameplay is
a little frustrating. The combat tutorial, while lengthy and certainly making
an attempt at being in-depth, took far too long to let go of the handlebars, and
when it did I still had a flimsy grasp
of how things worked half an hour later. When I did get a bit of an inkling on
how combat was meant to proceed, I found my contributions didn’t do much to
actually kill anything and that it was largely reliant on the enemy AI deciding
it felt sorry for me.

It might be
the kind of thing someone with a lot of time and patience for the irksome
character voices could work out, but I personally found it lacking. If nothing
else, it at least presented an alternative RPG combat system to the usual
drop-down-menu-click-a-button rigmarole, and that has to be highlighted. Might
be your cup of tea, but not really mine. I’m more of a coffee drinker anyway.

Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris

PC, Xbox One, PS4 - December 2014

If Tales of Xillia 2 was my favourite game
in this lot, Lara Croft’s latest sojourn is a very, very close second.

If you’ve
played a Tomb Raider game that wasn’t
that 2013 reboot thingy, then you’ll know the story; Lara finds a tomb, there’s
an artefact in there that unleashes bad things, hilarity ensues. Where Temple’s strength as its own game lies
is within the top-down shooter gameplay, positioned for the good ol’ “couch
co-op” days of local multiplayer, teamwork to solve puzzles and only the
occasional “accidental” dropping of your friend into a pit of spikes during
said teamwork.

The mechanics
for both soloists and multiplayers are streamlined and easy once you get the
hang of them; everyone has a unique ability suited to combat and
puzzle-solving, and convivial attitudes yield greater results. The challenge in
the demo I played escalated nicely, advancing from strange skeleton warriors
dispatched with one bullet to a bloody
massive underground crocodile trying to eat us. That bit in particular was
cause, at least on my end, for much yelling and frantic mashing of buttons.

What also
helps Temple is that each character
is not simply the same model with a different skin. All four playable heroes
have separate power sets and tools they can utilise, with the gameplay
tailoring itself to whichever characters are on hand for the puzzles. The lack
of a rigid structure or surface cosmetic differences is welcome, and I’d wager
one could play solo with all four in turn and come out with four similar but
fundamentally different runs.

Jumping
physics were a little finicky at times, deciding at the drop of a hat what was
and was not a jump-on-able surface whenever it felt like it, and the special
grapple attack Lara uses to abseil down rock faces to get at loot occasionally
decided to turn itself off just to make things interesting. Neither got hugely in
the way of the fun, though, which is great. I loved Temple of Osiris so much, I might even consider pawning a kidney to
afford a console to play it on this Christmas.

Thanks once
again to Bandai Namco and the Sydney studio for some truly excellent games.
Until next time!